Now raising $10M to accelerate Agentic AI Startups.
We are here to build the bridge between Brazilian Agentic AI Builders and the Silicon Valley ecosystem where the new AI era is taking shape.
Connect The Dots Ventures is a startup accelerator and venture builder, dedicated to helping people and enterprises navigate the ongoing and accelerated Agentic AI disruption we are living through. We work alongside founders from the earliest sketch on the whiteboard to mature operating businesses being reshaped by the new foundation.
Extraordinary Opportunity
There are moments in the history of technology when the ground shifts beneath us. Not the slow grind of incremental progress, but a generational reordering of what is possible, what is valuable, and what is obsolete. We are living in one of those moments.
Agentic AI has already changed the dynamics of the Software Engineering industry. In finance, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, and several other industries, AI agents are now helping builders deliver work in a fraction of the time.
Many will look at this and feel vertigo. We see the most extraordinary opportunity to build companies in the history of capitalism.
That is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic.
But not every version of this future is worth building. The companies we choose to build with are the ones creating agentic AI that empowers people, not the ones creating agentic AI that replaces them. This is the first filter we apply to every opportunity.
We back companies that make people more powerful.
Not the ones who make people less relevant.
When the metabolism of an industry accelerates, the natural advantages of incumbents erode faster than they can defend them. They are organized to protect what works, not to discover what comes next. Startups iterate. And when the tempo of an industry changes this dramatically, the startups almost always win.
Why we exist
We build with founders, not just bet on them.
Connect The Dots Ventures is a startup accelerator and venture builder. We sit at the table with founders to shape ideas into companies, take long-term ownership in the businesses we help build, and stay alongside them as they grow. Our portfolio is not a basket of bets. It is a deliberately constructed network of companies whose value compounds because they are connected to one another, from earliest-stage ideas being accelerated under our roof to mature operating businesses being reshaped by the new foundation.
Beliefs
Four convictions that shape every partnership.
Agentic AI must empower people, not replace them. The companies that endure will elevate human judgment, expand human reach, and remove the friction between intent and outcome. This belief is not decoration on our thesis. It is the thesis.
Agentic AI is not a feature. It is a foundation. Every product, every workflow, every company built on the assumption that humans drive the loop will be rebuilt on the assumption that agents do.
Cheap is the most underestimated force in technology. When the cost of doing something falls by an order of magnitude, the right answer is to do something previously unthinkable.
Serendipity is not luck. It is the reward earned by those who do the homework, bring the attitude, and stay prepared. We operate that way, and we back people who do the same.
Five principles. Every decision. Every relationship.
Trust
The foundation of everything. Without trust, capital is just money, and money is the most replaceable thing in venture.
Transparency
We tell founders, partners and investors what we think, plainly. Clarity, even when uncomfortable, is the highest form of respect.
Boldness
The bets that matter are the ones the consensus is too cautious to make. We look for partners cut from the same cloth.
Velocity
Speed is the dominant variable of this era. In a world where the cost of action keeps falling, hesitation is the only expensive choice left.
Hard work
Effort is the most controllable variable. We out-work the field because that is what every founder, partner, and investor we work with deserves.
Industries
Concentrated. Practitioner-led. Long-term.
We are concentrated by design, in bringing Agentic Disruption to 10 selected industries. We back fewer companies and hold them longer. We are practitioners, not spectators, and we connect the dots: each company in our portfolio is a vantage point on the same transformation across the ten industries below.
Agentic AI Impacted Industries and our Portfolio Investments
-
Software Engineering and Digital Transformation
Code generation, review, and refactoring are the most visible shifts, but the disruption runs deeper. Agents now ship pull requests, write test suites, debug production incidents, and maintain documentation autonomously. Junior engineering work is being absorbed; senior engineering work is shifting from writing code to designing systems and reviewing what agents have produced.
Portfolio Investments Already completed investments in this sector, through minority ownership at AI/R.
[SEEK FOR UOL AUTHORIZATION TO DISCLOSE AI/R] Completed -
Call Centers
Tier-one and tier-two ticket resolution, voice support, chat support, knowledge-base navigation, and intelligent escalation routing have all moved from human queues to agentic queues. Resolution rates on routine cases are now competitive with humans, cost-per-ticket has collapsed, and the human role is shifting toward exception handling and high-stakes relationship work.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Financial Services
Every layer of the stack is being rebuilt: underwriting, trading, fraud detection, compliance monitoring, reconciliation, KYC and AML screening, and wealth management. Mid-office and back-office processes are being compressed into agent-driven workflows. The shift is most pronounced in the work that requires reading documents, applying rules, and producing standardized outputs at volume.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Healthcare
Clinical documentation, prior-authorization automation, diagnostic support, and care-pathway orchestration are the highest-leverage entry points. Agents now read scans, draft clinical notes, navigate insurance bureaucracy, and coordinate handoffs between providers. The operational layer of care delivery, the work that surrounds the actual practice of medicine, is being rewritten from the ground up.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Law
Contract review, e-discovery, due diligence, regulatory compliance, legal research, and first-draft document generation are all collapsing in cost. The work that traditionally consumed associate hours, paralegal time, and contract attorneys is now produced in minutes. Firm economics, billing models, and partnership structures will all be restructured around the new cost curve.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Retail and Consumer Goods
Personalized recommendations, dynamic pricing, inventory and assortment optimization, demand forecasting, and product-listing content generation are the high-leverage areas. Agents now plan assortments, price in real time, write product descriptions at scale, and predict trends from consumer signals. The work of merchandising, planning, and category management is being compressed into agent-driven workflows.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Advertisement
Content generation, ad creative, video production, asset versioning, copywriting, and campaign optimization are dissolving the boundary between producer and machine. The work of producing variations at scale, testing them, and iterating on creative is being compressed from weeks to hours. Brand and strategy stay human, but the production layer is going agentic.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Manufacturing and Supply Chain
Routing, demand forecasting, inventory optimization, autonomous warehouse operations, last-mile delivery coordination, and supplier orchestration are the high-leverage areas. The decisions that traditionally required dispatchers, planners, and operations managers are being made in real time by agents that integrate weather, traffic, demand signals, and supply constraints.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Insurance
Claims processing, underwriting, fraud detection, customer onboarding, policy generation, and regulatory compliance are all being rewritten as agent-driven workflows. The work of reading documents, applying policy rules, assessing risk, and processing edge cases is the heart of insurance operations, and it is being automated end-to-end, not as point tools but as full-process replacement.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch. -
Education
Personalized tutoring, adaptive curriculum design, automated grading, language learning, and content generation are reaching scale. The promise of one-on-one instruction at population scale, deferred for thirty years, is being delivered. Teacher support, student assessment, and intervention systems are becoming agent-native, freeing educators for the work that genuinely requires human presence.
Portfolio Investments Evaluating potential investments. Reach out to pitch.
Invest
Join us in the journey. Own a piece of what we're building & Learn with the Ecosystem we've created.
Connect The Dots Ventures is opening a portion of its equity to the people we want as partners: operators, builders, and believers who see the same opportunity in agentic AI that we do. The company is structured as 10,000,000 shares, with a base price of $1 per share at the founding round. We're raising in three phases, each opening a different tier of access at a different valuation.
Phase 1
Community/Private Round: The first believers.
- Open to
- Individuals who believe we can thrive and are willing to take the risk with us
For people who believe early. First-come, first-served. This phase exists to align our cap table with the operators, founders, and engineers who will help shape what we build, not the people with the largest checkbooks.
Phase 2
Strategic Partners: Enterprise Boards seeking advice on their Agentic AI Transformation.
- Open to
- One Enterprise per Industry, in selected industries, by application only
- Includes
- CTDS to participate as a board advisor in your company
For companies that want Connect The Dots Ventures at the table as a venture builder, advisor, and connector. Selected industries where agentic AI is a generational shift: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, construction, and utilities.
Phase 3
Institutional Capital: Capital for the decade ahead.
- Open to
- Family offices and venture funds
For the institutions that fund the next stage of our build. Phase 3 closes the round and provides the operating capital to back companies for the long horizon our thesis requires.
Why this structure: most venture firms raise from a small number of LPs. We're doing it differently because the firm's thesis depends on the network we build around it. Founders we want to work with are usually not LPs of traditional funds; they are operators who can put a few thousand dollars behind something they believe in. We want them on our cap table. We want them as ambassadors. We want them as the first call when we need a beta tester, an introduction, or honest feedback. This is the lesson Monzo, BrewDog, and Republic-era equity crowdfunders proved: a thousand small investors who care deeply outperforms one large investor with no skin in the brand.
Where the capital goes
80%
Direct investment in accelerated and partnered companies.
10%
Operating capital to pay for the firm expenses.
10%
Scholarships for Building Agentic AI Early Talent (partnership with AI/R Academy).
What Community/Private Round investors get, beyond shares
Quarterly portfolio briefings: the same deal-flow notes we share with our partners.
Early access to founder office hours and demo days for accelerated companies.
An invitation to the annual investor gathering in San Francisco.
First look at any future capital raises before they open publicly.
Get Investment
Two kinds of investments. One generational thesis.
Martins, the founders building in this moment: history is on your side. The tempo has changed. You will iterate faster than incumbents can respond, at a cost they cannot match.
Falcons, the operators of revenue-stage businesses seeking to accelerate growth: this is the rarer kind of courage, and the kind we most respect.
To both: we are not here to take a small piece of your story. We are here to build alongside you, for as long as it takes. We are looking for the founders whose work, when it succeeds, leaves the people using it stronger than it found them.
Martins
Migratory. Adaptive. Builders from raw materials. Crossing vast distances every season.
Inspired by Y Combinator. Calibrated for an emerging Agentic AI venture builder bridging Brazil and San Francisco. Every quarter, we run a focused Cohort with the winners of each industry opportunity. We invest concentrated capital, attention, and access — and ask for a meaningful piece of the company in return.
First Cohort: July 2026. New Cohort every quarter after that.
Seed Investment per selected Startup
$10,000 for 10% of the company.
Disbursed in four quarterly installments of $2,500 across the startup's first year — first payment on day one of the Cohort, the next three at the start of each subsequent quarter. Designed to fund a full year of runway, not just the 12-week program. Documented in a standard, founder-friendly CTDS agreement. Non-negotiable terms by design.
How selection works (per industry opportunity)
~50
Applications meeting
minimum requirements
5
Invited to a 10-min
in-person pitch in SF
1
Of each opportunity
joins the Cohort
A 2% selection rate per opportunity. We choose to be small and concentrated rather than wide and thin.
Minimum requirements to apply
- ·
At least one founder with a meaningful Brazilian connection — born, raised, educated, or with substantial work experience in Brazil.
- ·
The product is built around Agentic AI, not generic AI features grafted onto an existing tool.
- ·
A working prototype or live product. We don't take ideas-only applications.
- ·
A founding team of 2, fully committed.
- ·
Available for 1 week per quarter of in-person work in San Francisco, and all the remaining time at one of the CTDS partner locations in Brazil.
One Year of Acceleration Support
- ·
$2,500 in cash wired on day one of the Cohort — the first of four quarterly installments that total $10,000 across your first year.
- ·
Hybrid workspace — work primarily from a CTDS partner location in Brazil, with a dedicated desk at the CTDS SF office (Focus Cowork, downtown SF) during your quarterly SF week.
- ·
Weekly 1:1 office hours with founder Alexis Rockenbach — remote most weeks, in-person during your quarterly SF week.
- ·
Group sessions with CTDS partners and advisors on product, distribution, hiring, and fundraising.
- ·
Curated introductions to investors, design-partner customers, and engineering talent in our SF network.
- ·
Quarterly Demo Day — pitch directly to executives of the companies backing CTDS's Phase 2 (Strategic Partners), who attend each Cohort's demo to find their next agentic AI partners and pilots.
Q3 2026 Cohort timeline
Why this structure
Concentrated mentorship. One company per quarter means the founder has the full attention of the firm.
High-signal selection. A 1-in-50 cut forces real quality, not volume.
Deliberate cadence. Each Cohort adds a permanent node to the alumni network — a Brazilian Agentic AI mafia in the making.
A real bridge. One week per quarter in San Francisco — paired with deep work at a CTDS partner location in Brazil — keeps founders rooted at home while building real ties in the SV ecosystem. Network, customers, and follow-on capital are formed in San Francisco; product, talent, and execution stay in Brazil.
Apply for the July 2026 Cohort
Falcons
Apex hunters. Sharp-eyed. Super fast. Striking from height with surgical precision.
For startups already shipping product and earning real revenue. Companies that have proven the bet works at small scale and are now looking for bridge capital, enterprise distribution, and the right network to push toward an institutional round. Modeled on Y Combinator's convertible-note structure for growth-stage Cohorts, calibrated to the CTDS thesis.
First Cohort: October 2026. Starts one quarter after the Martins inaugural Cohort. From there, same quarterly cadence; both tracks share the Quarterly Demo Day.
Bridge investment per selected startup
$100,000 via convertible note.
A standard CTDS convertible note that converts to equity at your next priced round, with a 20% discount and a $5M post-money valuation cap. A most-favored-nation clause means any better terms you raise on subsequent notes automatically apply to ours. Disbursed in four quarterly installments of $25,000 across your first year — first payment on day one of the Cohort, the next three at the start of each subsequent quarter. Designed to fund a full year of acceleration runway. Standard, founder-friendly, non-negotiable terms by design.
Why a convertible note instead of direct equity
- ·
The right instrument for the stage. Once a company has revenue, valuation conversations get real and contentious. A note defers that fight until your next priced round, when an institutional investor sets the price for everyone.
- ·
Aligned with your next round. CTDS converts at the same valuation your next institutional lead establishes — minus the discount that compensates us for taking the bridge risk earlier.
- ·
Cap protects the founders. If the next round prices at much more than $5M post-money, our conversion is capped — you keep more of the upside than a fixed-equity deal would have given you.
- ·
Faster to close. No 409A valuation, no cap-table negotiation. Term sheet to wire in a few business days.
Minimum requirements to apply
- ·
At least one founder with a meaningful Brazilian connection — born, raised, educated, or with substantial work experience in Brazil.
- ·
The product is built around Agentic AI, with at least one agentic component live in production.
- ·
Live product with paying customers. A clear ARR/MRR figure, or a pilot-to-contract pipeline that proves the company is past the "first sale" question.
- ·
At least 12 months of operating history with the current product.
- ·
A founding team of 2 or more, with technical and commercial leadership both represented.
- ·
A realistic plan to raise an institutional priced round within 12 to 24 months of the CTDS note.
What you get
- ·
$25,000 in cash wired on day one of the Cohort — the first of four quarterly installments that total $100,000 across your first year.
- ·
Weekly 1:1 advisory with founder Alexis Rockenbach and CTDS partners — focused on growth strategy, enterprise distribution, and fundraising prep.
- ·
Direct customer introductions to the enterprise backers from CTDS's Phase 2 — companies actively hunting for agentic AI solutions to deploy.
- ·
Follow-on capital intros to Series Seed and Series A funds in our San Francisco network, timed for your priced round.
- ·
Quarterly Demo Day pitch slot to the same enterprise backers — partnerships and pilots are the goal, not just visibility.
- ·
Dedicated SF workspace during your quarterly San Francisco week.
How selection works
Track 2 is bespoke. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with quarterly Cohort start dates. Each quarter we admit no more than three companies into Track 2. Decisions are made after a financials-and-traction review, reference calls with two existing customers, and a strategic-fit conversation with one of the CTDS partners or enterprise backers. We do not run an open funnel — we want enough time to actually understand each company.
Apply for the convertible note program
The ground is shaking.
We are leaning in.
About us
Built in San Francisco. Built for the agentic decade.
Connect The Dots Ventures is a startup accelerator and venture builder focused on the Agentic AI era. We work alongside founders to build the products, infrastructure, and operating businesses that empower people and help organizations thrive in this new foundation. We do it from the city where most of that work is happening.
We are concentrated, practitioner-led, and patient. We are ready to hold our positions for longer, if that creates more value, and we are not seeking immediate returns. We do not chase rounds; we build with the founders and operators we believe in, for as long as they will have us.
Alexis Rockenbach
Founder, Agentic CEO & ctds.co only employee :)
Alexis is the founder of Connect The Dots Ventures and an experienced entrepreneur who led the growth and US expansion of a software engineering company he co-founded in Brazil. He builds at the intersection of agentic AI and operational practice, partnering with founders he would want as co-builders and operators willing to rebuild what they have already built. He lives and works in San Francisco.
Headquarters
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